Standing in the storied Canterbury Pulpit above the president on Tuesday, Bishop Mariann E. Budde was a little afraid.

The leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, she had planned for months to preach on three elements of unity — dignity, honesty and humility. But just 24 hours earlier, she had watched President Donald Trump proclaim his agenda from the inauguration stage, as conservative Christians anointed him with prayer.

He was no longer just campaigning — he was governing, she thought. His nascent presidency and flurry of executive orders had so far encountered little resistance. She felt called to add a fourth element to her sermon: A plea for mercy, on behalf of everyone who is scared by the ways he has threatened to wield his power.

“I had a feeling that there were people watching what was happening and wondering, Was anyone going to say anything?” she explained quietly in an interview Tuesday night. “Was anyone going to say anything about the turn the country’s taking?”

So, she took a breath, and spoke.

Trump, seated 7 feet below and some 40 feet to her right, made eye contact. One representation of American Christianity began speaking to another, and the most powerful man in the world was arrested by the words of a silver-haired female bishop in the pulpit. Until he turned away.

For everyone watching, the vastness of Washington National Cathedral compressed, in one stunning moment, into a sudden intimacy. And with it, all the existential fights not simply of politics, but of morality itself. In a flash, the war over spiritual authority in America burst into a rare public showdown.

The Canterbury Pulpit confronted the bully pulpit on the greatest possible stage.

For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of it has been Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power declaring itself the one true voice of God.

Many of these fights have been siloed, rarely in dialogue. Christians of opposing perspectives almost never worship in the same sanctuary. They do not listen to one another’s sermons, or hear the other’s prayers. Mainline Protestants have wondered if their voice can have any measure of authority. At a moment when conservative Christians are poised to gain even more power through Trump’s second term, Budde tried something different at the interfaith service.

Trump was unmoved. When the sermon ended, he exchanged a look with Vice President JD Vance, a conservative Catholic, who shook his head in apparent disapproval. On Wednesday morning, Trump retorted on his social media platform Truth Social, demanding an apology from the “so-called Bishop” and “Radical Left hard line Trump hater.”

“She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way,” Trump declared Wednesday. “She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.”

Budde, 65 and the first woman elected to her role, and Trump clashed in 2020 when he held a Bible aloft at St. John’s Church, after officers used tear gas against protesters calling for racial justice in nearby Lafayette Square. She wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times that she was “outraged” and “horrified” that he used sacred symbols to espouse “positions antithetical to the Bible.”

On Wednesday, Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., said Budde should be “added to the deportation list.” Others said her gender itself undercut any claim to spiritual authority.

“Female bishop is all you needed to know how it was going to turn out,” Kristan Hawkins, a Catholic anti-abortion activist, wrote on the social platform X.

But progressive Christians felt their convictions finally had a voice in the melee. Former President Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic who represented a recovery of liberal Christianity after the first Trump presidency, has left Washington, taking an era with him. Catholic power in America has shifted greatly to the right since Pope Francis, now 88, was welcomed to Washington during the Obama era.

More than 14,000 people signed an online petition thanking Budde within four hours. Episcopalians around Washington proudly posted online in gratitude that Budde was their spiritual leader, representing their Christianity.

For her part, Budde felt her sermon was “a perspective that wasn’t getting a lot of airtime right now, and it was a perspective of Christianity that has been kind of muted in the public arena,” she said.

She knew she did not have a lot of authority in the room, she said, “because I am not a part of the spiritual circles that have surrounded the president and his party.”

The venue was meaningful, offering her words the power of Christian history. Washington National Cathedral has long been home to significant American political moments — services marking the end of wars, and state funerals for presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter.

And the Canterbury Pulpit itself is an imposing platform, even when not addressing the president, Budde knew. Its Caen limestone is believed to have been brought to England by William the Conqueror, and used in the Canterbury Cathedral itself. The pulpit is where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached his final Sunday sermon, days before his assassination.

Its central carving depicts the signing of Magna Carta, the 809-year-old charter establishing that the king of England was not above the law.

Budde occupied the lofty perch with no real power beyond the spiritual authority of her position, and the power to speak uninterrupted, for 14 minutes. She was robed in her liturgical vestments, the red and white rochet and chimere, used for prayer services without the Eucharist. Her academic hood signified her seminary doctorate. The black tippet around her neck was embroidered with the emblem of the Cathedral.

Budde does not believe she was speaking directly for God. “I’m saying, this is the best that I can do to understand and interpret what I believe our teachings and our scriptures and what the Holy Spirit might be wanting us to hear,” she said.

Amid America’s diversity, she sees discernment over spiritual authority as an important task. She thought of what Howard Thurman, the American theologian, called “the sound of the genuine.”

“What is real?” she asked. “What resonates with authority because it rings true, and it touches upon some fundamental principles that perhaps we agree upon?”

Previous inaugural prayer services were hosted by the Cathedral but planned with the Presidential Inaugural Committee, meaning the president-elect often picked the participants. But that changed last year, when the Cathedral itself took over the planning well before Election Day, Budde said. It was a move toward religious independence, so the service itself would be free of partisan interference and so it would not be seen as a coronation or sacred anointing.

After Trump won in November, the Cathedral gave his team a selection of proposed music and readings to consider for the service. But the choice of preacher was reserved for the Cathedral alone, a spokesperson for the Cathedral said.

The part of the sermon that would attract the most attention, however, wasn’t crafted until hours before the service.

“To plea for mercy is actually a very humbling thing to do,” Budde said. “I wasn’t demanding anything of him. I was pleading with him, like, can you see the humanity of these people? Can you acknowledge that there are people in this country are scared? … If not him, if not the president, could others?”

On Wednesday afternoon, Budde was still working through the aftermath.

She had not anticipated the level of fury and personal attack that her words had unleashed, she said. People were questioning everything from her character and qualifications to the state of her eternal soul, and “how soon I should get to my eternal soul, and whether I belong in this country.”

“Maybe this was naive on my part, when I decided to plea to the president I thought it would be taken differently,” she said, “because it was an acknowledgment of his position, his power now, and the millions of people who put him there.”

But she also had not expected the overwhelming gratitude from so many others.

“These are things I say all the time,” she said. “But publicly, people aren’t paying attention.”

In the pulpit, she said, “you can never really predict how things will land.”

The New York Times Services